Faryn joined the 27 News team as a newscast producer in 2025. She is from Waunakee and previously worked in communications in the Office of Crime Victim Services. She is a graduate of UW-Madison with degrees in Communications Arts and Spanish.
MADISON (WKOW) — Madison College celebrated the start of Earth Week with a ribbon cutting for a 180-kilowatt solar array paired with a 200-kilowatt-hour battery energy storage system at its Protective Services Building on the Truax campus.
The system was funded through an energy innovation grant from the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. Students from the college’s energy technology program were involved in designing the project and worked through engineering models to size both the solar array and the batteries.
“Our students were involved in the design of the project initially,” said Ken Walls, an instructor in Madison College’s energy technology program. “They worked through some engineering models to size both the PV array and the batteries.”
The energy produced will serve the Protective Services Building, which houses the college’s police and fire science programs. Both programs are considering acquiring electric vehicles in the future, and the solar array will provide an energy source to charge those vehicles.
The system includes an artificial intelligence-enabled battery management system that will pick up on patterns of solar generation and building usage to send out stored energy when it is most needed.
“It will learn both the patterns of the solar generation and the user patterns of the building occupants and when the electricity is most needed, to smartly dispatch the energy that’s stored in the battery,” Walls said.
The solar panels are seasonally adjustable, allowing the tilt angle to be varied between summer and winter. Students will perform these adjustments each fall and spring semester, applying classroom learning to hands-on field work.
Sylvia Ramirez, executive vice president for finance and administration at Madison College, said the project serves two purposes. It functions as a learning laboratory for students in the college’s renewable energy certificate program and the Center for Renewable Energy Advanced Technology Education, and it reduces operational costs.
“It actually reduces our operational costs and allows us to reinvest that money and things that are rich and critical for students, like classroom instruction and student services,” Ramirez said.
Over the few years, the system is expected to become more efficient as the artificial intelligence learns to optimize energy storage and release.
Faryn joined the 27 News team as a newscast producer in 2025. She is from Waunakee and previously worked in communications in the Office of Crime Victim Services. She is a graduate of UW-Madison with degrees in Communications Arts and Spanish.
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